See how developers and climate-focused builders used energy APIs and utility APIs from Palmetto, Shovels, Texture and Bayou to build workable demos during our 24 hour hackathon.
In April, the SF Climate Week Hackathon highlighted creative and impactful ideas across the energy tech landscape. The event was co-hosted by Bayou, Palmetto, Shovels, Texture, Stepchange and Virta Ventures.
In just 24 hours, 36 builders stitched together working demos, each powered by APIs thanks to:
- Shovels: Makes building permit data useful. Shovels continuously tracks, normalizes, and categorizes hundreds of millions of building permit records across the country. Shovels API docs can be found here.
- Texture: The developer platform for energy–a powerful API-first system designed to help you quickly integrate, analyze, and act on energy data. Texture API docs can be found here.
- Palmetto: With nothing more than an address, Palmetto’s Energy Intelligence API returns estimated home energy consumption and production, as granular as hourly, broken down by fuel type and disaggregated to end use. Palmetto’s energy API docs can be found here.
- Bayou Energy: Provides a suite of APIs for companies to effectively deploy clean energy devices across many utilities, including a utility API that gives companies access to any metered utility data instantly and reliably. Bayou’s utility API docs can be found here.
A big thank you to our judges for their questions and insightful feedback:
- Russell Sprole of Virta Ventures
- Charles Oppenheimer of the Oppenheimer Project
- Tim Connors of PivotNorth Capital
- Juliet Rothenberg of Google Climate AI
- Quentin Barber of Rewiring America
The judges placed a strong bias towards demos addressing User Insights (Who is it for? Is there a real pain point?), Data Use (Creative use of APIs), Impact (Climate relevance or energy savings) and Simplicity (Can users act in one minute?).
Watch the full presentation below:
Below is a recap of the day, the teams, and what their projects tackled.
1. Voltiv: Predict-and-Prevent Grid Maintenance (🥇First Place Winner)
Team: Christelle Fayemi, Neil Vodoor, Lee Carter
Watch Voltiv’s demo here: https://youtu.be/dWo-FS2xHh8?si=KavjL4OZpPE336O_&t=2165
Utilities perform preventative maintenance on transformers and sub-stations, though they mostly use 40-year-old technology to carry out their work. Voltiv transforms this preventative maintenance to be more intelligent, with improved data capture through new sensors and energy APIs.
Voltiv leveraged Palmetto’s API to demo their tool, showing a forecast of a live “risk score” for each transformer or substation on the SF grid.
Congrats to this team for winning the hackathon!
2. Battery Bot: Right-Sizing Solar & Storage (🥈Second Place)
Team: Eric Munsing, Utkarsha Agwan, Martin Offenberger, Anshu Goyal, Chino Lex and Moiz Kapadia
Watch Battery Bot’s demo here: https://youtu.be/dWo-FS2xHh8?si=v5XJsmYezTtThoAC&t=185
Right-sizing solar and electric appliances is difficult when installers tell homeowners to maximize the size of their proposed system based on arbitrary oversizing criteria. This scenario often leads to extremely high prices and confused homeowners who are left wondering what’s the best use of their funds considering their electrification goals.
Battery Bot enables homeowners to right size electrification upgrades with a simple intake form. When a user enters their home address, the tool calls the Palmetto energy API and returns home energy usage analytics. The output includes an analysis of the upgrade impact of solar, batteries, EVs and heat pumps on monthly energy bills, replacing the “oversize by 50%” guess that happens today.
3. Hackathon Energy: Beat the PG&E Legacy Tax (🥉Third Place)
Team: Phil Carter, Singla Anu, Michael Skeating, Roger LeMesurier, Sean Bray
Watch Hackathon’s demo here: https://youtu.be/dWo-FS2xHh8?si=fpipPjY1NYKusOQb&t=1379
Microgrids (typically on-site solar, battery storage and more) provide resilience, lower cost of energy and increased property values to local communities. However, they don’t fit into the legacy model of PG&E’s Transmission & Distribution system.
Hackathon Energy effectively works like an independent power producer, owning the on-site battery and storage systems while selling energy as a service to the municipal utility. This provides new revenue streams to the city/muni and decreases energy bills for its citizens, saving a projected $0.20/kWh.
4. CarbonAware: Emissions-Smart Job Scheduling
Team: Donny Flynn, Camille Matonis, Karsten Bruening, Maja Ostrowska, Ryan Singman
Watch CarbonAware’s demo here: https://youtu.be/dWo-FS2xHh8?si=BLmvLd6P0tI83J1F&t=611
Developers scheduling cron jobs and other cloud workflows don’t know the emissions impact of their work, despite data centers emitting 50M times more than a single household.
On top of this, sustainability teams face mounting pressure to reduce their carbon impact across the software stack. The carbon intensity of these data centers fluctuates dramatically, but what if developer teams were aware of the lowest-emitting times to schedule their workflows?
CarbonAware is a workload scheduling tool that picks the best time and place to run jobs based on grid carbon data. Leveraging a Kubernetes webhook and reading carbon-intensity APIs from Palmetto, developers can shift jobs to “cleaner” hours, cutting emissions 3-12%.
5. Energy Muffin: Peak-Time Nudges for Renters
Team: Mubarak Abdul Kader, Mariam Amkhaz, Ammar Aljerwi, Luis Arevalo, Troy Hodges
Watch Energy Muffin’s demo here: https://youtu.be/dWo-FS2xHh8?si=mo8IIkq9UcEZI-_J&t=1009
44M renter households have no viable options to save money on energy and be more sustainable. Current recommendations to save on energy consumption lack the effective impact that renters are looking for.
What if we could help renters shift some of their energy consumption to the least carbon-intense hours?
With Energy Muffin, renters can now do this. The app enables users to connect their PG&E energy data in under a minute with Bayou’s instant utility api. Renters then receive push notifications alerting them when to use certain appliances (“Start laundry now, save $1.73.”).
Leveraging Palmetto’s APIs, the tools can predict usage forecasts and intelligently alert users to the best times to use energy, saving up to $641 per year.
6. Kelp: The Yelp Score for kWh
Team: Richard Ma, Omar Almatov
Watch Kelp’s demo here: https://youtu.be/dWo-FS2xHh8?si=sMhNrZl724T-RanL&t=1625
Making energy efficiency a top priority for small businesses is challenging, however, the impact of lower energy costs and increased sustainability helps both the business save money and attract more customers.
Kelp has two components: One is a platform for small businesses that connects their PG&E data via Bayou’s utility API to view electricity consumption trends. Additionally, with Palmetto’s API, the tool provides a score (0-100%) for energy savings recommendations.
The second component is a consumer-facing Chrome extension that creates a “Kelp Score” next to Yelp ratings, showcasing the businesses emissions and energy data so consumers can make more informed climate-conscious decisions.
7. Solar Share: Crowdfunded Community Solar
Team: Brian Gardner, Jordan Niell
Watch Solar Share’s demo at: https://youtu.be/dWo-FS2xHh8?si=QpkkORl_JSXNJTPT&t=1917
As a renter or homeowner in a multi-family building, the option of purchasing solar for their roof is unattainable. Despite wanting to invest in these clean energy technologies, most people don’t know how to find people to invest with, or where to buy property to get “the best electric bang for our collective bucks.”
Solar Share connects potential investors to others, enables them to group funds, find locations for clean energy sites and distributes revenue to the investor group based on the project’s energy output.
8. REC Aggregator: One-Click Renewable Credits
Watch their demo here: https://youtu.be/dWo-FS2xHh8?si=GIUtvP2MHOpMgGVW&t=2441
Aggregating enterprise energy generation for verified REC certification can be challenging due to high-volume, high-fidelity and timestamped generation data to perform the work.
This tool enables everyday businesses and large enterprises to earn from clean energy contributions to the grid. The team utilized Texture on the edge for device onboarding, in addition to Bayou’s API for instant utility data.
9. Portfolio Analyzer: CLI Energy Audits
Team: Femi Adeniran
What their demo here: https://youtu.be/dWo-FS2xHh8?si=qPKKOMKvjfQUD7qT&t=2806
Leveraging the Palmetto API, this tool allows users to input home addresses in order to return data on the payback and CO₂ abatement for electrification upgrades like heat pumps, EV chargers, and more.
Want to build with a reliable utility API?
Bayou Energy’s mission is to make obtaining customer utility data simple, freeing up developers to focus on their core product.
Our instant and reliable Utility Data API pipes live meter data to customers across the US today, including some of the top community-solar providers, distributed energy platforms, and energy-savings apps.
We teamed up with Palmetto, Shovels, Texture, StepChange Ventures, and Virta Ventures, plus a packed venue of investors and product leaders, to show off how the builders of today are leveraging energy data, utility APIs and AI to build the climate-focused platforms of tomorrow.
Check out Bayou’s docs or get started for free with the product.
Look out for more hackathons coming soon!
Leave a Reply